Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, a major exhibition examining the life and work of one of this century's most remarkable and influential figures, will open at The Jewish Museum on April 18 and remain on view through September 9, 1999. Few figures have had as decisive and fundamental an influence on the course of modern cultural history as Sigmund Freud. Yet few figures also have inspired such sustained controversy and intense debate. The exhibition will underscore the contested legacies of Freud, and also show how notions of the self, including identity, memory, childhood, repression and sexuality have been shaped in relation to his work. Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture has been organized by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud-Museum, Vienna, and the Freud Museum, London.

Following its New York showing, the exhibition will travel to the Sigmund Freud-Museum and the Austrian National Library, Vienna (October 21, 1999 - February 6, 2000); Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (April 4 - July 25, 2000), sponsored by the Getty Trust and the Skirball Cultural Center; the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, Sao Paulo, Brazil (Fall 2000), and the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois (Summer 2001).

The exhibition will feature more than 130 vintage photographs, prints, films, manuscripts, letters and documents and first editions of many publications from the Library of Congress' collection of more than 80,000 Freud items, the majority of which has been donated over the past four decades by the Sigmund Freud Archives. These materials will be supplemented with loans from the Freud Museum in London; the Sigmund Freud-Museum in Vienna; and other important collections.

Also displayed are home movies of Freud and objects from his study and consulting room -including materials from his desk, the chair in which he sat when listening to patients, a model of his consulting couch, and examples from his own collection of antiquities. Approximately 180 film and television clips, and selections from newspapers, magazines and comic books are included in the exhibition to demonstrate the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis on popular culture.

The exhibition is divided into three parts: "Formative Years," "The Individual: Theory & Therapy," and "From the Individual to Society."

The first section will begin with Freud's formative years in late 19th-century Vienna, emphasizing points of contact between Freud's intellectual development and major political and cultural events. Highlights will include family photographs, correspondence, early work in neurology, and items documenting his early medical career.

In the second section, visitors will be introduced to the key concepts in psychoanalytical theory, such as the interpretation of dreams and repression, and will be shown how Freud used those concepts in the treatment of some of his most important patients. Highlights of this section will include manuscripts in Freud's hand, a model of Freud's consulting couch, the chair from which he conducted analytic sessions, and the death mask of the Wolf Man (one of Freud's best-known patients).

The third section will show how Freud applied his ideas of individual human psychology to understand the dynamics of society and culture. His theories of the violent origin of civilization and his understanding of the function of religion, art and science in contemporary society will be explored. Critical reception to his ideas and treatments will be addressed in this section, as well as the diffusion of Freud's ideas in professional psychoanalysis. The diversity of post-Freudian analysis will be made apparent, as will the influence of Freud's ideas in a variety of cultural arenas, from the arts to the sciences.

Many have investigated and speculated about the role of religion in Freud's thought. Born on May 6, 1856 into a Jewish family with religious roots, Freud would live a secular life while continuing to identify himself as a Jew. Jacob Freud, Sigmund's father, dedicated a copy of the family Bible to his adult son, with a Hebrew inscription calling it a "keepsake and a token of love."

Freud returned repeatedly in his writings to the Biblical stories of Joseph and Moses. Michelangelo's Moses, Freud explained, was both angry at the infidelity of his followers and eager to bestow on them the great gift he had received on Mount Sinai. Michelangelo's rendering of this ambivalence seems to have provoked Freud's own feelings about his place in the psychoanalytic movement. In the last years of his life, Freud once again returned to the story of Moses and reflected on themes common to his early and late work: the impact on memory and the identification of people with a leader they both love and hate. Freud seized on the notion that Moses was an Egyptian and based a story of the evolution of Western religion and the role of Judaism in European culture on it.

The German army marched into Vienna in March 1938, and Hitler annexed Austria to the Third Reich. As a Jew and as the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud was regarded as an enemy of the new Germany. In his final interview with the Gestapo, who insisted he sign a statement saying he was not mistreated before he was allowed to leave the country that June, the 82-year-old Freud is said to have sarcastically asked if he could add: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." When the Freud family left Vienna for London, they were fortunate to be able to bring most of their possessions with them. Princess Marie Bonaparte, a close friend and colleague, loaned them the money to pay the "refugee tax" extorted by the Nazis before refugees could transport their belongings. Four of Freud's sisters remained behind in Vienna. Various efforts to secure them visas in 1939 were of no avail, and they died in concentration camps.

The exhibition concludes with a rare British Broadcasting Corporation radio recording of a short statement read with difficulty by Freud, who was struggling with incurable cancer of the jaw. The BBC recording was made on December 7, 1938. Freud died on September 23, 1939.

The exhibition curator is Michael S. Roth, Associate Director, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. A review panel of leading scholars and consultants in the fields of cultural and intellectual history and psychoanalysis helped shape the exhibition. In New York, the exhibition has been coordinated at The Jewish Museum by Susan Chevlowe, Associate Curator of Fine Arts. The physical exhibition design is by Chermayeff and Geismar Inc., New York.

The Library of Congress, in cooperation with Alfred A. Knopf, has published a companion volume in conjunction with the exhibition that comprises a wide range of views about psychoanalysis and its place in contemporary culture. Contributors include Harold Blum, José Brunner, Frank Cioffi, Robert Coles, Hannah Decker, Muriel Dimen, John Forrester, Peter Gay, Ilse Grübich-Simitis, Adolf Grünbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, Peter Kramer, Edith Kurzweil, Patrick Mahony, Michael Molnar, Michael Roth, Oliver Sacks, Art Spiegelman and John Toews. The book will be available for $26 hardcover and $12.95 paperback in the Museum's Cooper Shop.

The exhibition and its programming at the Library of Congress were made possible through support provided by Discovery Communications, Inc.; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Vienna; the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York; Alfred A. Knopf; the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress; the Mary. S. Sigourney Award Trust, New York; Dr. & Mrs. Kenneth Altshuler; the Charles A. Dana Foundation, New York; the Ministry of Science and Transport, Austria; the American Psychoanalytic Foundation; Lotte Köhler Foundation; Austrian Airlines; Östrreichische Lotterien; Hoffman-LaRoche Inc., O.S. Wyatt Jr., Houston; the American Psychoanalytic Association; the Embassy of Austria; the New-Land Foundation, New York; Peter Sobolak, Vienna; and other generous private contributors.

The exhibition at The Jewish Museum is made possible by Fleet Bank, the Louis and Anne Abrons Foundation, the Joseph Alexander Foundation, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, The Joe and Emily Lowe Foundation, Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation and Amy Cohen Arkin, with additional funding from the Alfred J. Grunebaum Memorial Fund. Public programs have been made possible by the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York, and the William Petschek Philanthropic Fund. Support has also been provided by The NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and The Psychoanalytic Society of the Postdoctoral Program, Inc.; The Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association; The American Institute for Psychoanalysis (of the Karen Horney Center); the American Psychoanalytic Association; William B. and Jane Eisner Bram; Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and The Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine; The Council for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists; Institute for Expressive Analysis; Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR); National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis; The New York Freudian Society; The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; Psychoanalytic Association of New York and NYU Psychoanalytic Institute; Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman; Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund; Washington Square Institute for Psychotherapy and Mental Health; Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology and other generous funders.